Effect of Catapult
Catapult is a contra dance weekend with the goal of making it easier for bands to start getting booked for dance weekends, festivals, etc. They get something like six bands and six callers together in Atlanta over memorial day weekend, and they encourage people who are involved in booking bands and callers elsewhere to come dance. This makes some sense: dance weekends are generally once a year, so they're generally pretty conservative in their booking because a bad band or caller could do a lot of damage. Instead you have one weekend that goes out on a limb with less proven performers, but they have a whole lot of different performers and dancers know what they're getting.
They're currently near the end of their application process, with applications due 12/29, and people were asking whether it was worth applying. Now, when I went with the Free Raisins in 2013 we had a blast, so I'd definitely recommend it as a fun weekend. But is it worth it from the perspective of it's goals? Will it get you booked for weekends and things?
This is a hard question to answer, because it could be that Catapult is just identifying people who would soon be getting booked for these things otherwise [1], as opposed to making the difference between getting booked and not. On the other hand we could at least look at bookings for bands and callers post-Catapult.
I have data [2] on how many weekend/festival gigs bands played in 2014, 2015, 2016, and part of 2017 . So if we go through the bands who played Catapult in 2012, 2013, and 2014, how many gigs do we see?
Bands:
2012
Floorplay
Gypsy Caravan
La Banane Enchantee
The Noteboys
On The Fly
Birmingham 2014
Sassafras Stomp
Footfall 2014
Lava Meltdown 2014
Stellar Days & Nights 2014
Adirondack 2015
Balance the Bay 2016
Wintergreen 2016
Ooh La La 2016
2013
Coracree
February Dancing Fool 2014
When in Doubt Swing 2015
The Free Raisins
Adirondack 2014
Appalachian Spring 2014
Fire Ant Frolic 2014
Spring Fling 2014
Youth Dance Weekend 2014
Florida Fall Ball 2015
Flamingo Fling 2015
Footfall 2015
Spring LEAF 2015
Pigtown Fling 2015
Pittsburgh Fall 2015
Swing into Summer 2015
Trillium Twirl 2016
Dance Trance 2016
IndepenDance 2016
Fly the Coop 2016
Solefest 2016
Hey Fever 2016
February Dancing Fool 2017
Springforth 2017
Ladies at Play
Spring Kimmswick 2014
When in Doubt Swing 2014
Flamingo Fling 2015
FolkMADness 2015
Steam!
Solefest 2014
FolkMADness 2016
Pilgrim's Progression 2016
Dancing with the GODS 2017
Uncle Farmer
Balance the Bay 2014
Faultline Frolic 2014
Fire Ant Frolic 2014
Camp Damp 2015
Chehalis 2015
Fall Lady of the Lake 2015
SF Bay Queer Camp 2017
Waxwing
2014
Celador
Burning Man 2014
Eel House
Free Association
Frost and Fire
SF Bay Queer Camp 2015
Gender Free Camp 2016
Footfall 2016
Party of Three
Adirondack 2016
Gypsy Moon 2016
Whitewater Whirl 2017
Velocipede
The bands that played Catapult in 2013 seem to have gotten booked for many more things than the ones who played in 2012 or 2014. What's going on? Is it just that the dances I have data from are when the 2013 cohort was at its best? Let's look at counts by "years-since-Catapult" to correct for this:
cohort y1 y2 y3 y4 2012 missing 4 1 3 2013 12 13 8 future 2014 1 4 future future
In the years where we have comparable data, the 2013 cohort was booked much more widely than the 2012 or 2014 one. It's not just one outlier band distorting the numbers either—if we remove the most booked band from the 2013 cohort we still have:
cohort y1 y2 y3 y4 2012 missing 4 1 3 2013 7* 6* 2* future 2014 1 4 future future
Or we can look at the number of bands in each cohort with at least one gig in that year (each year had six bands):
cohort y1 y2 y3 y4 2012 missing 2 1 1 2013 5 4 2 future 2014 1 2 future future
That's pretty strange! Is it just that Catapult 2013 had especially good musicians, or that in 2013 lots of bookers came to Catapult? One factor is that La Banane Enchantee (2012) lost a band member to the UK. They were the most popular band of their cohort, winning the audience vote the only year Catapult did voting, and if they had continued to be playing gigs in the US they might have played a lot of them. But that's not enough to explain the difference.
I don't have as good data for callers, just 2016, which isn't even a consistent distance out from the three cohorts, but lets look at it. If we see many more callers from the 2013 cohort getting gigs then that suggests (a) Catapult was helping and (b) more bookers were at the 2013 event, while if we don't then it's more likely that 2013 just happened to select good bands.
2012
Jean Gibson-Gorrindo
Michael Hamilton
Swing into Summer 2016
Looking Glass 2016
Pittsburgh Fall 2016
Valerie Helbert
Rachel Shapiro
Susan Taylor
Mary Wesley
Lava Meltdown 2016
FolkMADness 2016
Flamingo Fling 2016
Balance the Bay 2016
Dance Camp North 2016
Rochester Thanksgiving 2016
2013
Quena Crain
Luke Donforth
Fiddling Frog 2016
IndepenDance 2016
JoLaine Jones-Pokorney
Tavi Merrill
Kristin Seibert
Keith Tuxhorn
2014
Jerome Grisanti
Brian Hamshar
Adirondack 2016
Ridge Kennedy
Frannie Marr
Florida Snow Ball 2016
February Dancing Fool 2016
Corvallis 2016
SF Bay Queer Camp 2016
FolkMADness 2016
Burning Man 2016
Dance in the Desert 2016
Florida Fall Ball 2016
Dana Parkinson
Swing Shift 2016
Harvest Moon 2016
Anna Rain
Interesting! Both the 2012 and 2014 cohorts had substantially more bookings for 2016 (four and two years out) then the 2013 cohort did (three years out). So it's probably not that there were more dance bookers at Catapult 2013.
Another thing we could look at is whether the same weekends tend to book Catapult talent. If there's a lot of overlap, that's more reason to think catapult had an effect. Here are dances by their frequency in the two lists above:
Adirondack (4 of 9 slots)
2014: The Free Raisins (2013 cohort)
2015: Sassafras Stomp (2012 cohort)
2016: Party of Three (2014 cohort)
2016: Brian Hamshar (2014 cohort)
FolkMADness (4 of 8 slots)
2015: Ladies at Play (2013 cohort)
2016: Steam! (2013 chort)
2016: Frannie Marr (2014 cohort)
2016: Mary Wesley (2012 cohort)
Balance the Bay (3 of 8 slots)
2014: Uncle Farmer (2013 cohort)
2016: Mary Wesley (2012 cohort)
2016: Sassafras Stomp (2012 cohort)
February Dancing Fool (3 of 10 slots)
2014: Coracree (2013 cohort)
2016: Frannie Marr (2014 cohort)
2017: Free Raisins (2013 cohort)
Flamingo Fling (3 of 5 slots)
2015: The Free Raisins (2013 cohort)
2015: Ladies at Play (2013 cohort)
2016: Mary Wesley (2012 cohort)
Footfall (3 of 11 slots)
2014: Sassafras Stomp (2012 cohort)
2015: The Free Raisins (2013 cohort)
2016: Frost and Fire (2014 cohort)
SF Bay Queer Camp (3 of 7 slots)
2015: Frost and Fire (2014 cohort)
2016: Frannie Marr (2014 cohort)
2017: Uncle Farmer (2013 cohort)
Fire Ant Frolic (2 of 6 slots)
2014: The Free Raisins (2013 cohort)
2014: Uncle Farmer (2013 cohort)
Florida Fall Ball (2 of 4 slots)
2015: The Free Raisins (2013 cohort)
2016: Frannie Marr (2014 cohort)
IndepenDance (2 of 7 slots)
2016: Luke Donforth (2013 cohort)
2016: The Free Raisins (2013 cohort)
Lava Meltdown (2 of 10 slots)
2014: Sasafras Stomp (2012 cohort)
2016: Mary Wesley (2012 cohort)
Pittsburgh Fall (2 of 8 slots)
2015: The Free Raisins (2013 cohort)
2016: Michael Hamilton (2012 cohort)
Solefest (2 of 4 slots)
2014: Steam! (2013 cohort)
2016: The Free Raisins (2013 cohort)
Swing into Summer (2 of 8 slots)
2015: The Free Raisins (2013 cohort)
2016: Michael Hamilton (2012 cohort)
When in Doubt Swing (2 of 5 slots)
2014: Ladies at Play (2013 cohort)
2015: Coracree (2013 cohort)
(Keep in mind that I only have caller data for 2016, my 2017 band data is incomplete, and I don't have any 2013 data. With those included there would probably be more overlap. This is also why the number of slots is kind of strange.)
Weekends by how many catapult performers were booked in the sample:
number of catapult bands and callers booked number of weekends 4 2 3 5 2 8 1 34 0 80
This is 73 slots out of approximately 1,088. [3] With ~6% of slots going to Catapult alums, it doesn't sound like Adirondack, FolkMADness, etc being nearly half Catapult alums is a coincidence. Except that we still can't tell the difference between those weekends selecting people the same way Catapult does, and Catapult helping them get selected.
[1] Some people say this is what top colleges do.
[2] For this post I'm using the raw data in Dance Weekends, Festivals, and Long Dances, and I'm not counting things like the Brattleboro Dawn Dance or other gigs where bands play much less than you do at a typical dance weekend.
[3] 1,088 comes from totaling:
2014: 238 band slots
2015: 254 band slots
2016: 269 band slots, 241 caller slots
2017: 86 band slots announced so far
Comment via: google plus, facebook